The DPS Distance Learning Department is an asynchronous learning community that delivers curricular instruction via the internet, broadcast television, and with in-person tutorials. This rigorous computer and technology-based curriculum features high academic standards that drive student growth, promotes student academic achievement, and provides personalized educational opportunities. The Multimedia Learning Theory that serves as the basis for curricular delivery, instructional practice, and assessment techniques facilitates and supports independent inquiry, self-motivation, and self-reliance within the student population, seeking to expand and enrich human potential, and emphasizing students, staff, and the community to empower life-long learning.

Vision

DPS has a diverse student body with a broad range of social and educational needs. As a district-wide service provider for high schools with students who are at risk of dropping out, the DPS DLD constructs individualized learning programs designed to meet the specific needs of at-risk students. These at-risk students comprise a significant portion of the overall high school student body within DPS schools. The Distance Learning Department is capable of and does use the recommendations, directives, and viewpoints of the Denver Plan, the DPS Department of Curriculum and Instruction, professional educators, Academics, and educational scholars to provide a district-wide service that enables students to work in an asynchronous, online environment with dedicated, motivated, and talented teachers accustomed to the difficulties and needs at-risk students bring to school. Through the use of online learning in a small learning community, at-risk students can receive the credit recovery courses and supplemental courses necessary to get them back on track and prepared to function at a higher academic level in their home school. With the guidance of Online High School teachers and staff, using the Denver Plan as the school’s foundation of programmatic implementation, and monitoring attendance and achievement, the DLD is the proper department to use to reduce the drop out rate and serve DPS at-risk students with the 21^st century Multimedia Learning Theory.